Notes from the Chair 1
David Cunningham Joins Department 1
Markens and Lillrank to be Postdoctoral Fellows 2
Kath Weston Visits Again in Fall 2
Conrad Organizes US-UK Medical Sociology Conference 2
Irving Kenneth Zola Memorial 2
In Memory of Marcia Hood Brown 3
Faculty Notes 3
Thanks for the Memories... 4
News from Department PhDs 4
Current Grad Student Activity 5
New PhDs 6
New Jobs 6
New MAs 6
Incoming Class of 1999 6
Undergraduate Honors Thesis Symposium 7
Undergrad Notes of Interest 7
Coming this Fall: New and Improved Website 7
NOTES FROM THE CHAIR
This has been a busy year in the department. This year celebrated Brandies' 50th anniversary, with a range of events and lectures, which many of us participated in. During much of the year we were engaged in faculty searches. After a search in the Fall, we hired Jo Anne Preston for a two-year full-time appointment focusing on Aging. Jo Anne has been with the department on a half-time basis for several years and we are very pleased that she will now be with us full-time. She will teach courses in aging, professions, education, and gender and work. In the Spring, we searched for a quantitative-oriented sociologist to replace Michael Macy who moved to Cornell two years ago. With a large and strong applicant pool, we are most pleased that David Cunningham will be joining the department (see article below). Finally, a subset of us interviewed candidates for a new postdoctoral fellowship which was awarded to Susan Markens, who completed her undergraduate work in Sociology at Brandeis a decade ago. (see article below).
This year Maury Stein will begin is final year before retirement. Maury has been in the department for 44 years and it is hard to imagine Brandeis Sociology without Maury. He has had an extraordinary influence on our department and will be missed.
Karen Hansen has received fellowships from the University of California, Berkeley and the National Endowment of the Humanities. She will spend the 1999-2000 academic year Center for Working Families at UC Berkeley and return to Boston with additional semester off to develop her NEH research. We expect her to return to the department in January 2001. Karen promises a café latte to any Brandeis affiliate who comes to visit her in Berkeley!
You'll find notices about other doings in the department in the newsletter. We want to include information on our PhDs so I encourage you to send in notices about your accomplishments and life and professional situation. We publish the newsletter in summer but collect material all year. I urge you to send it now, because if you put it off, you may forget and that will be our loss.
DAVID CUNNINGHAM JOINS DEPARTMENT
After a lengthy national search, the department is delighted that David Cunningham will be joining us this September as an Assistant Professor. David just completed his Ph.D. at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His dissertation, "Organized Repression and Movement Collapse in a Modern Democratic State" is a study of the organized repression of protest groups by the FBI's counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) against the New Left and White Hate Groups between 1964-71. David has several publications, including "The Dynamics of Repression: FBI Counter-intelligence and the New Left" and "American Sociological Association Elections, 1975-96: Exploring Explanations for 'Feminization'" (co-authored, American Sociological Review). David has already reinvigorated our computer lab, which now contains totally new equipment. At UNC David won the Everett K. Wilson Graduate Student Teaching Award. At Brandeis he will teach "Community Structure and Youth Subculture" and "Evaluation of Evidence in Quantitative Research" (as a joint seminar) in the Fall and "Race and Power in Intergroup Relations" and "Quantitative Methods of Social Inquiry" in the Spring.
Markens and Lillrank to be Postdoctoral Fellows
For the first time, the Department will be hosting two Postdoctoral Fellows, both with interests in sociology of health and illness.
This year the Departments of Sociology and Anthropology were awarded a two-year Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in "Illness and Ethnicity" (under the direction of Peter and Stefan in Sociology and Sarah Lamb and Judith Irvine in Anthropology). After a search, the committee was pleased to appoint Susan Markens to the post. Susan received her B.A. in Sociology from Brandeis in 1989 (Magna Cum Laude) and her Ph.D. from the UCLA in 1997. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Health Sciences at UCLA. Susan has published a number of papers, including "The Problematic of 'Experience': A Political and Cultural Critique of PMS" (Gender and Society, 1996) "Feeding the Fetus: On Interrogating the Notion of Maternal Fetal Conflict" (co-authored, Feminist Studies, 1997), and "'Because of the Risks': How US Pregnant Women Account for Refusing Prenatal Screening" (co-authored, Social Science and Medicine, 1999). In addition to medical sociology, Susan's interests include Gender, Race and Class, and Political Sociology. As part of the post-doc Susan will teach one course each semester. This Fall she will teach "Politics of Reproduction" and in Spring she will teach a course related to illness and ethnicity.
The Department will also host Annika Lillrank of Finland as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Annika received her Ph.D. in 1998 from the University of Helsinki. Prior to her Ph.D. she had extensive experience as a social worker, graduate study in Sociology at the University of Kansas, and a variety of experiences in teaching and research. Annika has published her dissertation as Living One Day at a Time: Parental Dilemmas of Managing the Experience and Care of Childhood Cancer.
Kath Weston Visits Again in Fall
Kath Weston, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University West, will be a visiting professor again in the Fall semester. Kath spent a semester with us two years ago and we are happy she is returning. Most recently she was a Fellow at the Bunting Institute. She has many publications, including Render Me, Gender Me: Lesbians Talk Sex, Class, Color, Nation, Studmuffins (Columbia University Press, 1996) and the award-winning Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (Columbia University Press, 1991). Kath will teach "Families" and "Issues in Sexuality."
Conrad Organizes US-UK Medical Sociology Conference
Peter Conrad was co-organizer (with Mike Bury) of the first joint US-UK medical sociology conference, "Medical Sociology Toward the Millennium:
Continuity and Change in Health and Medicine." The conference took place at the University of London, Royal Holloway from June 20-23 and was attended by 110 participants from 10 countries. Brandeis Sociology was very well represented: in addition to Peter, Stefan Timmermans, graduate students Valerie Leiter and Rafael Hernandez and PhD's Donald Light ('70), Phil Brown ('79), Susan Bell ('81), Lynn Schlesinger ('94) and David Shafer ('99) attended.
Irving Kenneth Zola Memorial
The Sociology Department announces the establishment of the Irving Kenneth Zola Fund at Brandeis University and invites you to contribute, in order that the two projects listed below may be advanced in Irv's name.
"Let any acknowledgment of my death be a celebration of the life I have led."
--Irving Kenneth Zola
The Zola Fund will comprise of these two projects:
* sponsoring an annual Irving Kenneth Zola Memorial Lecture at Brandeis, on disabilities rights activism.
* purchasing videos and films on disability-related and progressive social change themes-both dear to Irv-for the Brandeis library. (Some of these will be closed-captioned.) Each video and film will have an appropriate name-plate.
For the annual disabilities lecture, we hope to spend $500 per year on the honorarium, $500 on travel expenses and accommodations for the speaker, $500 for posters and mailings and possibly a small dinner for the speaker, and $500 for the annual purchase of videos that will be purchased and noted in Irv's name. We thus plan to spend $2000/year. Since we
anticipate an income of 5% per year from the endowment we will raise, we are setting a goal of $40,000 for the Fund plus $1000 for start-up costs. Our fund-raising goal, then, comes to $41,000.
"By agreeing that there are twenty million disabled, or thirty-six million, or even half-the population in some way affected by disability, we delude ourselves into thinking there is some finite (no matter how large) number of people. In this way, both the defining and the measuring, we try to make the reality of disease, disability, and death problematic and in this way make it at least potentially someone else's problem. But this is not and can never be. Any person... may be able-bodied for the moment. But everyone...will at some point, suffer from at least one or more chronic diseases and can be disabled, temporarily or permanently, for a significant portion of his/her life."
--Irving Kenneth Zola
"All of us must contend with our continuing and inevitable vulnerability."
--Irving Kenneth Zola
By coping with his own history of denial and acceptance of his disabilities, and combining that with his sophisticated, penetrating sociological analyses of culture and medicine, society and disabilities, Irv Zola was central in creating the field of disability studies and became its foremost spokesperson and activist. His pioneering work in founding the Boston Self-Help Center, where people with disabilities learn to achieve maximally independent lives, is one of many examples of Irv's joining scholarly understanding with activism. His founding and long-time editorship of the scholarly journal Disability Studies Quarterly is another.
Irv's life continues, among other ways, in the lives and actions of people he has inspired. The projects we present for the Irving Kenneth Zola Memorial Fund at Brandeis University are two modest and specific ways through which the values, determination, insights, and wisdom, of this extraordinary person also will continue.
As next October will be the yahrzeit (memorial remembering) making 5 years since Irv's passing, we hope to have our memorial fund complete by then.
Please make out checks to Brandeis University, with "Zola Memorial Fund" on the memo line, and send them to Zola Memorial Fund, c/o Professor Gordon Fellman, Sociology Department, MS 071, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
02454-9110.
In fond and loving memory of Irv, thank you.
--Gordie Fellman
In Memory of Marcia Hood Brown
Marcia Hood Brown received her Ph.D. from our department in 1997. She was an outstanding student and a creative young scholar. She died suddenly this past Spring. All who knew her were saddened. We held a small memorial gathering for Marcia in Pearlman Lounge. Gila offers her thoughts and feelings about Marcia.
I carry a deep grief in my heart for Marcia, and I do not know how to express the loss that I feel. One may try to bring some measure of comfort to self and to others by sharing the memory of her, by remembering the good in her short life.
Marcia was our student, also a friend and a colleague. She taught, tutored, lectured, edited and shared her life and mind with many of her classmates, her students and us; she privileged and honored the department with her presence. Marcia was unusual and we knew that. One immediately recognized her presence and energy, sensuous and intellectual at once; a powerhouse of ideas and projects that were massive and yet disciplined in design and in execution. It was impossible not to notice her; there was always a certain degree of radiance to her appearance, conversations, interactions, and then the power of her intellect, truly vibrant and engaging. She loved life, ideas and she loved service.
Marcia was her own person, with a deeply rooted identification with the unprivileged and the marginalized in society. In her intellectual endeavors and throughout her academic life Marcia would not seek gain or advantage that would compromise her convictions and unconditional commitment to the poor. Her dissertation was the crowning of this sort of intellectual and moral integrity. In it she documented the embellished forms of ideological fronts and the false self-importance of the power-seekers, as she articulated the needs of the powerless, of real women exposed to, and maimed by the injuries of disproportionate struggle in life. In her two years of post-doctoral work she resumed this line of work when she joined a social service project evaluating social intervention programs. Marcia was after service, not status success. True service has no glamour and may, sometimes, even exact a price. So in this, Marcia, we find in you that ancient virtue of being faithful to your self and ethics.
I grieve now for all that promise and youth that is gone. I will grieve for you for a long time.
--Gila Hayim, July 2, 1999
Peter Conrad has co-edited two volumes which will be published shortly. The first is Sociological Perspectives on the New Genetics (Blackwell, 1999), which includes his introduction "Sociology and Genetics: An Overview." The second volume is the fifth edition of the Handbook of Medical Sociology (Prentice Hall, 2000), to which he contributed two chapters, "Medicalization, Genetics and Human Problems" and "Medical Sociology at the Millennium" (co-authored). He has also recently published "A Mirage of Genes" (Sociology of Health and Illness, 1999) and has two papers coming out this Fall, "The Uses of Expertise: Sources, Quotes and Voice in Reporting Genetics in the News" (Public Understanding of Science) and "Genetic Imaginations" (Society).
Gordie Fellman's book Rambo and the Dalai Lama was published this year and he has been busy giving books talks around the country. Gordie was also awarded the Louis Dembitz Prize for Outstanding Teaching this year. Gordie was promoted to Full Professor.
Karen V. Hansen presented a paper on her research, "The Reservation Frontier: Lakota Encounters with Norwegian Homesteaders, 1887-1929," at Women's Worlds '99, an international conference on women, held in Tromso, Norway. Karen reports that attending the summer solstice north of the Arctic Circle with a couple of thousand feminists was inspirational. Her first article from the project, "Historical Sociology and the Prism of Biography: Native Americans, Chautauquas, and Trade, 1893-1929," is forthcoming in Qualitative Sociology.
Gila Hayim gave an invited paper this year on the "Social Psychology of the Theory of Action" at the 10th biennial Conference of the North American Sartre Society in Los Angeles. She also presented a paper, "System Theory and Self-thematization in an Era of Globalization," in July at the 34th Congress of the International Institute of Sociology at Tel-Aviv University.
Jo Anne Preston contributed a review article "Occupational Gender Segregation: Trends and Explanations" to a special issue of the Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance on "Women at the End of the Millennium: What We Know, What We Need to Know." Jo Anne will also be a visiting scholar at Radcliffe next year where she has received a research support grant and will be researching the life course of women college graduates in the twentieth century. At the ASA meetings held recently in Chicago she presented a paper on elder abuse and chaired a panel addressing the interplay between qualitative and quantitative research on gender and work.
Shula Reinharz has created a multi-page document entitled "200+ Facts about Women at Brandeis," in response to seeing a University publication for the 50th anniversary which included no facts about women.
In connection with this publication, she organized a session at the meetings of the Eastern Sociological Society concerning the relation between sociology and history.
Shula continues to be director of the Women’s Studies Program and co-director of the International Research Institute on Jewish Women.
Shula received three honors this year: Woman of Distinction from Hadassah; Academy of Women Achievers which she accepted in Boston from the YMCA; and an Award from the New Jewish High School of Greater Boston. She has completed the bulk of fund-raising ($2.4 million) for the renovation of part of the Epstein Facilities Building, in order to establish a Women’s Studies Research Center on campus. There are still several "naming opportunities" available at different price levels, in case you are interested!
George Ross was the acting director of the Center for European Studies at Harvard for this past year. His recent publications include Syndicalisme et Globalisation (Brussels: FGTB); The Brave New World of European Unions (with Andrew Martin et al); and Democracy, Revolution and History with principal editor Theda Skocpol. George continues to globe-hop in search of the perfect black diamond ski slope.
Stefan Timmermans’ book Sudden Death and the Myth of CPR was published in July 1999 (Temple University Press). He presented papers at the American Sociological and Anthropological Association meetings and the Society for the Social Study of Science. He is currently engaged in an ethnographic study of how medical examiners determine manner and cause of death.
A short paper of Kurt Wolff’s called "My Interaction with Simmel’s ‘The Personality of God’" was presented in Italian translation at a Simmel conference at Salerno University, Italy, in November 1998. Kurt is managing his health and living independently at an assisted living complex in Newton, about 10 minutes from the University. He continues to write articles and books and would enjoy hearing from his former students, colleagues and friends. (Kurt lives at 2300 Washington St., #237, Newton Lower Falls, MA 02162. Ph: 617-244-8323)
Judy Hanley and Elaine Brooks have recently celebrated 10 years with the Department. They have contributed enormously to the well-being of the department and to the support of faculty and student alike. We all appreciate the efforts.
Amy Agigian(PhD 1998) has been appointed to a tenure track assistant professor post at Suffolk University.
Michael Bodeman (PhD 1979) moved from Cambridge to Toronto in 1974 where he has been teaching ever since, luckily with numerous breaks, at the University of Toronto. The latest such break has taken him to sociology at Tel Aviv University where he is the spring visiting scholar. His most recent publication, "Eclipse of Memory. Representations of Auschwitz in the Post War Period" looks at the ways in which early West German Sociology, Carl Schmitt and some popular literature have dealt with the Shoah. His main interest in recent years concerns post-war German-Jewish relations. His book Gedaechtnistheater. Die juedische Germeinschaft und ihre deutsche Erfindung, 1996 was picked as one of the top ten non-fiction books by the German book critics and in Austria among the top six. His other area of interest concerns classical German Sociology’s conception of the stranger/Jew, and he has written in this respect so far on Weber (Archives Europeennes de Sociologie, 1993); on Simmel and on Werner Sombart. When he is not in Toronto, you may find him in Berlin, or at least his name in the local telephone book. He spends time there trying to write a larger study on the remarkable revival of Jewish life in Germany.
Phil Brown (PhD 1979) has published Catskill Culture: A Mountain Rat's Memories of a Great Jewish Resort Area (Temple University Press, 1998). He has received a Robert Wood Johnson Fellowship to develop his research on controversial environmental illnesses.
Levon Chorbajian, ed (PhD 1974) has a new book out, Studies in Comparative Genocide (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1999). It’s U.S. distributor is Scholarly and Reference Division of St. Martin’s Press.
Patricia Collins (PhD 1984) has published Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice with University of Minnesota Press.
Todd Crosset (PhD 1992), Assistant Professor of Sport and Society at U.Mass-Amherst, is organizing a section on sports and social problems for the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
Lynn Davidman's (PhD 1986) new book, Motherloss, will be published by University of California Press in the Spring.
Faith Ferguson (PhD 1999) received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and is now officially a co-PI on "Alternative Careers in Medicine: The Full-Time Physician’s Perspective." She is at the B.U. School of Social Work, Center on Work and Family, as a Research Associate. Next year she’ll be interviewing full time colleagues of part time physicians exploring work/family issues under managed care.
Jeanne Guillemin’s (PhD 1973) book Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak will be published by University of California Press in December.
Jeffrey Herf (PhD 1981) received the American Historical Association's George Lewis Beer Prize for his book Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys.
Donald Light (PhD 1970) has recently published "Good Managed Care Needs Universal Health Insurance" in Annals of Internal Medicine (1999); "The Sociological Character of Health Markets" in Handbook of Social Studies in Health and Medicine (1999); and "The Medical Profession and Organizational Change: From Professional Dominance to Countervailing Power" in Handbook of Medical Sociology, 5th edition (2000).
Kathleen MacPherson (PhD 1986) was named the recipient of the Walter E. Russell Chair in Philosophy and Education at the University of Southern Maine, 1996-98). This included a public lecture "Theory, Practice and the Millennium: Theory as Healing."
Victoria Pitts (PhD 1999) has an upcoming article in Body and Society entitled "Body Modification, Self-Mutilation, and Agency in Media Accounts of a Subculture."
James Ptacek’s (1995) book Battered Women in the Courtroom: The Power of Judicial Responses was published by Northeastern University Press in their series on Gender, Crime and Law (1999). He is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Suffolk University.
Bert Useem (PhD 1980) has written two books on prison riots. He is currently funded by the National Science Foundation to work on a project studying the effects of rates of imprisonment on aggregate crime rates.
Johnny Williams (PhD 1995), assistant professor at Trinty College (CT), has published "Race and Class: Why all the Confusion?" in Berl Lang (ed.),
Race and Racism in Theory and Practice (Hyman and Littlefield).
Elizabeth Anne Wood (PhD 1999)has written an article titled, "Working in the Fantasy Factory: The Attention Hypothesis and the Enacting of Masculine Power in Strip Clubs" which is published in Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.
C.J. Churchill presented his paper "The Ultra-Modern Self: Erving Goffman and the Contemporary Drift" at the ESS conference this past March . He was a respondent and chair at the April, 1999, International Thorstein Veblen’s Cautionary Tale. He co-organized the sixth annual conference of the Institute for the Analysis of Contemporary Society to be held at the New School for Social Research this June under the theme "Master Trends in Politics, Culture and Economy" He will also be presenting his paper "Frontiers of the Absurd: Henry James’s ‘The American’ and Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’" at this conference. His paper "Globalization and Structures of Power: A Weberian Inquiry" was one of 15 papers chosen from an international pool of submissions to be presented at the conference "Globalization 2000: Convergence or Divergence?" which will be held at the University of Calgary this coming September.
Jillian Dickert is currently writing a paper with Professor Theda Skocpol at Harvard University analyzing child/family advocacy and social policymaking in historical perspective. They will present the paper at an Urban Institute conference on children this fall. Recently Jillian also co-authored a paper with Lotte Bailyn, Paula Rayman and Francoise Carre entitled "Designing Organizational Solutions to Integrate Work and Life" for a special issue of Women in Management Review forthcoming in 1999 vol 14, no. 5. Last fall she served as a presenter/discussant at the Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management conference panel on the "Family & Medical Leave Act After Five Years: Looking Towards the Future." For the past year Jillian had been intensely involved as a researcher/advocate with the Mass. Coalition for Family Leave, and was part of the small policy group that designed the two paid family leave bills currently under consideration by the Massachusetts Legislature. At a legislative briefing for the bills held in February at the Massachusetts State House, she presented her paper "Making Family Leave More Affordable in Mass.: the temporary disability Insurance Model" published by the U. Mass Boston Center for Women in Politics and Policy. She was invited to participate in a national meeting of advocates and researchers convened in December in Washington DC, by the National Partnership for Women & Families, which spearhead the coalition that passed the FMLA in 1993.
Jean Elson is the 1999 recipient of the Graduate Student paper Award for the Health, Health Policy and Health Services Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Her winning paper is titled "Discovering Agency: The Meaning of Estrogen Replacement Therapy for Surgically Menopausal Women." Jean’s book review Silicone Survivors, by Susan Zimmerman, will be published in an upcoming issue of Contemporary Sociology. Jean has been a Dissertation Fellow of the American Association of University Women during 1998-1999, and plans to complete her dissertation, about the impact of gynecological surgery on gender identity, this fall. She also organized a thematic panel "The Right to Medical Care: Gender Issues" for the SSSP annual meeting in Chicago, and is completing her term as student representative to the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociology Association.
P. Rafael Hernandez was a recipient of the Kellogg Fellowship in Health Policy Research award. The fellowship will provide substantial academic opportunities and finacial support. The program is designed to support the fellows for five years; two in residency and three during the dissertation writing process. In Raphael’s case the fellowship will support his dissertation years with a stipend and financial resources towards the dissertation expenses.
Rafael presented "Conceptual and Analytic Uses of Race and Ethnicity in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 1960-98: Research Edification and the Study of Mental Health" (with Thomas A. LaVeist) at the SSSP meeting and "Conceptual and Analytical Uses of Race and Ethnicity in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 1960-68: Historical Dynamics in Medical Sociology" at the ASA meeting.
Kay Jenkins presented "Christian Women on the Third Wave: Feminism, Gender and Family in the International Churches of Christ" at the 1999 ASA meeting.
Christa Kelleher presented two papers at the ASA meetings: "Is Pornography Domination or Liberation? Psychcoenergetics and the (Re)creation of the Masculine Subject in Straight Porn" (with Katrin Kriz) and "Breastfeeding in Modern Times: The Usurption of Traditional Values by Technical Rationality." She also presented "Early Departures from the Maternity Ward: A Survey of the Medical Literature, 1933-99" at the SSSP.
John Kelly presented a paper, "The Rhetoric of Social Solutions," at the 1999 SSSP meeting.
Valerie Leiter was awarded a Merck Foundation dissertation grant and a Brandeis University Prize Instructorship. She presented "Parental Rights in the Early Intervention Program’ at the Society for Disability Studies in May 1999. She also presented "The Construction of Parental Rights in the Early Intervention Program" in August 1999 for the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Together with Professor Timmermans she presented "The Normalization of Risk: The Therapeutic Rehabilitation of Thalidomide" at the American Sociological Association in August 1999.
Monisha Das Gupta - "Identities, Interests and Alternative Spaces: A Transnational Perspective on South Asian Political Participation in the United States"
Faith Ferguson - "Kin Keepers and Gatekeepers: Kinship and Family Identity Among Single Mothers by Choice"
Victoria Pitts - "Body Strategies: Signifying the Body in Subculture"
David Shafer - "Respiratory Therapists on the Edge: Technology, Professions and Medical Work"
Elizabeth Wood - "Working in the Fantasy Factory: Interaction, Intimacy and the Construction of Power in Strip Clubs"
New Jobs
Monisha Das Gupta has accepted a tenure-track position at the Department of Sociology at Syracuse University.
Victoria Pitts has accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Sociology at Queens College in New York.
David Shafer has a one-year appointment at the University of South Florida.
New MAs
* Mimi Arnstein
* Emily Kolker
* Katrin Kriz
* Sarah Merin
* Ingrid Rivera
* Dendrick Williams
* Otoe Yoda
Incoming Class of 1999
Ph.D. Program
Sociology
Alison Angell--B.A. in Sociology (1997) from Bates College. Presently Alison is interested in feminist/gender studies, life & qualitative methods.
Barbara Browning--B.A. in sociology and women’s studies (1995) from Wittenberg University post baccalaureate study in women’s studies at Ohio State University. She is currently interested in women’s studies.
Christopher Gillespie-- B.S. (1996) from Weber State University. He is currently attending UMass, Boston where he is working on his degree in applied sociology. Christopher is interested in health as a construct.
David Goldin-- B.S. in business finance from Northeastern University and an M.A in economics also from Northeastern University. David currently works at Heller as a social policy research analyst.
Cheryl Kingma--B.A. in sociology & women’s studies (1997) from University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is interested in community studies.
Joint PhD Program, NEJS & Sociology
Benjamin Phillips--B.A., University of Sydney, majored in government & public Administration, minored in Jewish civilization, thought & culture.
Joint PhD Program, Heller & Sociology
Stephanie Bryson--B.A. from Colorado College and MA from Smith College School for Sociology Work. She’s interested in social work and sociology; policy and cultural studies; qualitative and quantitative research; clinical work and teaching.
Mignon Duffy--Mignon is presently at Heller, has taken courses in our department and has already begun thinking about GACs.
Deborah Potter--is presently at Heller, has taken courses in our department and also begun thinking about GACs. Her interests include Medical Sociology, Methods and Social Policy.
Undergraduate Honors Thesis Symposium
In April the Department conducted the second annual symposium presenting the work of its senior thesis writers. The following students presented their year-long projects to the department faculty:
Adam Barbanel-Fried - "Microfinance in the United States: Assessing its Potential"
Cindy Klein - "Managed Care and Doctor-Patient Relations"
Michelle Risley - "The Best of Both Worlds? Intergenerational Relationships, Gender, and Family Values in the South Asian Muslim Diaspora"
Christie A. Roberts - "Instructing Gender: Native American Girls and Education"
Lori K. Sapir - "A Secret Indulgence: The Underlying Motivation for Gang Rape"
Selena B. Shelley - "Uncovering Myths: An Examination Into the True Causes and Results of Teenage Pregnancy and Motherhood"
Alexandra Stockman - "The New Femininity: Female Athletes and Changing Concepts of Gender Identity and Body Image"
Heather Stone - "Religion in the Work of Simone de Beauvoir"
Alyssa Danielle Weiss - "The Effects of Material Sociological factors and Maternal Interaction Skills on Early Child Language Development in Two Risk Groups: Children Prenatally Exposed to Cocaine and Pre-Term Children"
Michelle R. Witman - "Social Curricula: Teaching Social Competency to Elementary School Children"
Undergrad Notes of Interest
*This year’s recipient of the ‘Frank Leslie Honor Award to an Outstanding Senior in Sociology’ was Matthew R. Segal ‘99.
*Phi Beta Kappa’s Mu Chapter of Massachusetts has inducted the following sociology concentrators this year:
Maureen Dimino ‘99
Lili Fahang ‘99
Gary Feit ‘99
Annelies Goger ‘99
Michelle Risley ‘99
Matthew Segal ‘99
Stacey Stein ‘99
and
Alana Levy ‘00
Coming this Fall: New and Improved Website
Under the direction of Carmen Sirianni and with the assistance of graduate student Kay Jenkins, Alex Winner (BA ‘99) has done a remarkable renovation of our website, with more information, more links, more photos, etc.
The Sociology Department will have a new Website beginning this fall.It features the main areas of concentration in the graduate program: Gender and Feminist Studies; Medical Sociology; Politics and Social Change; and Theory and Methods. In each of these areas we profile the resources that students can access: our faculty and their specific interests and publications; and related programs and institutes at Brandeis and local area universities, where students can get additional coursework, teaching and research experience.
The Website also features the accomplishments of our PhDs in these and related areas. We have begun this by listing those positions and publications of which we are aware, and hope to make the profiles more complete over the course of next few months.
Doing this always makes us realize what a wonderful group of students has wandered the halls of Pearlman over the years, and has enriched our collective learning in so many ways. So, don’t be shy: send us your publications, awards, positions--anything else that helps us follow your work. Or, better still, e-mail Elaine Brooks, our graduate administrator at brooks@brandeis.edu, which can also be done directly from the website.
And don’t miss the latest photos of our faculty in the natural habitats of their choosing!
Look for us at www.brandeis.edu as we shift to the main Brandeis website in late September.